Je Me Figeais, a film by Baptise Sola.

Pivot, a short animation film by Andre Bergs, Arno De Grijs, Floris Vos, Kevin Megens and Alex Debick

Film the blanks. via Surfstation

I had been wanting to do this for some time, I have finally picked up a wide-angle lens – and I decided to go really wide. Until picking this lens up, I had never shot with a wide-angle before other than my Canon XT’s 17-55 zoom kit lens… But that definitely does not count. If I was going to shoot with a wide-angle, I wanted it to be for my film Nikon F3 camera. After reading a great review, I chose the Nikon 20mm f4 over the Nikon 20mm f2.8. I am usually a sucker for wide apertures, but the extremely small size of the lens (seriously, the thing is tiny), its 52mm diameter and the renowned sharpness and low distortion of this lens sold me. I know that shooting in low light is going to be more difficult with this lens, but my recent switch to 400 ISO film will help that out.

Being completely virgin to wide-angle lenses, using a 20mm lens is a whole new experience – everything through the viewfinder looks new and fresh. Especially since I have been using my 105mm exclusively for the past few months, going to such an extreme change really made me look at things differently. The 20mm lens has a 92 degree angle of view as opposed to the 105mm’s 23 degree angle of view. I have only taken one roll (which still needs to be developed) with this lens. I am eagerly awaiting the results and the alleged sharpness that this lens brings. Nonetheless, I am extremely happy shooting with a lens that so violently changes my view once I put the camera up.

Additionally, I will soon have a very nice 28mm lens at my disposal. This will theoretically finish off my Nikon lens purchases… I may have one more pick left, but that remains to be seen. Check out the photoblog mid next week – hopefully some photos from the new lens will be up there.

Very few of us enjoy the close-boxed mentality of big media. The whole mindset essentially flies right in the face of how the web works and continues to ignore how society interacts with media. I just ran across an example of how media 2.0 and the internet’s open model has seemed to influence an independent film titled Revoloution.

The premise is quite simple – moviegoers can watch the movie for free and then decide how much they wish to pay after they have finished watching it. We all have gone to movies and have felt quite robbed from the experience. Many people do not frequent theaters as often because it is not worth the gamble to spend a sizable chunk of change on something they may not like. Big-business media will almost assuredly never sign onto something like this for various reasons – one being that their product is, well, bad. Hollywood is already losing money, this would just speed up the process. Nonetheless, this model could be a much more beneficial model for aspiring filmmakers to garner an audience and begin to create buzz on a particular piece of work.

I could see a more hybridized version of this type of payment where less is paid up front and a ‘tip’ is requested after the movie is over. If I only had to pay $4 to $5 to get into a movie, I might just start going to movies again. Additionally, if the movie is decent, I definitely would provide a tip. Of course this model is more risky than the pay-up-front model, but with declining ticket sales, they may want to consider taking a few risks and getting creative. One thing I do know, hiking up the price of tickets is not going to work.

For more details on this experiment, watch the video below:

Much of the media online is free without even the slightest hint of payment. Even for the lucky (and talented) individuals publishing high-quality work exclusively on the web, compensation still is a challenge. However, people are making it and some are doing quite well for themselves. With the rise in popularity of web media with its low overhead and much less profit, big business is going to need to rethink payment models and the content they are willing to spend millions on to produce. (Many) people know crap when they see it – sadly, the majority of all media (internet or not) falls into that category. However, on the web, I do not have to pay $15 or sit through 20 minutes of commercials to see it.

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